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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. According to Eagleton, what idea is "truly elitist" in literary studies?
(a) "The idea that works of literature can only be appreciated by those with a particular sort of cultural breeding."
(b) "The idea that literature is the only way to understand a particular culture."
(c) "The idea that literature should not be read by those without a higher degree."
(d) "The idea that literature can only be understood by writers of literature."

2. How do linguists describe the effect of language where "the texture, rhythm and resonance of words are in excess of their abstractable meaning."
(a) "A disproportion between two signifieds."
(b) "A disproportion between two signifiers."
(c) "A disproportion between one signifier for every other signified."
(d) "A disproportion between signifiers and signifieds."

3. According to the Russian formalist Osip Brik, Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" would have been written if Pushkin had what?
(a) Been uneducated.
(b) Not lived.
(c) Married early.
(d) Died young.

4. What person is NOT included in the ranks of Russian formalists?
(a) Roman Jakobson.
(b) Boris Tomashevsky.
(c) Heinrich Wolffin.
(d) Viktor Shklovsky.

5. Eagleton argues that the criteria for what counted as literature in the eighteenth-century was what?
(a) Practical.
(b) Ideological.
(c) Religious.
(d) Canonical.

6. During the 1960s, what kind of students began to enter higher education that broke down assumptions about literary studies?
(a) Students from supposedly "first-world" countries.
(b) Students from supposedly "cultivated" backgrounds.
(c) Students from supposedly "uncultivated" backgrounds.
(d) Students from supposedly "third-world" countries.

7. For E.D. Hirsch, the aim of "policing" an author's meaning is to what, according to Eagleton?
(a) Sell her/his "private property."
(b) Control her/his "private property."
(c) Protect her/his "private property."
(d) Alter her/his "private property."

8. For Eagleton, E.D. Hirsch attempts to "offer a form of knowledge" that is what?
(a) Temporary.
(b) Telling.
(c) Timeless.
(d) Titular.

9. According to Eagleton, why is E.D. Hirsch able to maintain his view that literary meaning is absolute and resistant to historical change?
(a) Because meaning is viewed as pre-historic.
(b) Because meaning is viewed as pre-linguistic.
(c) Because meaning is viewed as pre-arranged.
(d) Because meaning is viewed as pre-modern.

10. According to Eagleton, as the first industrialist capitalist nation, England becomes what kind of state?
(a) A free state.
(b) A wealthy state.
(c) A police state.
(d) A perfect state.

11. According to Eagleton, "theory was a way of _______ literary works from the ________of civilised sensibility'"
(a) Excluding; oppression.
(b) Studying; truth.
(c) Emancipating; stranglehold.
(d) Dismissing; idea.

12. What kind of language does Eagleton say people think of literature as?
(a) Strange.
(b) Dull.
(c) Difficult.
(d) Ordinary.

13. According to Eagleton, Stanley Fish's model excludes the possibility that there is a ______ of interpretations?
(a) Struggle.
(b) Acceptance.
(c) Rejection.
(d) Dominance.

14. According to Eagleton, why did the Russian formalists NOT see a literary work as a vehicle for ideas, reflection of reality, or transcendental truth?
(a) Because they saw language as words and not objects or feelings.
(b) Because they saw language as obtuse, vague, and ephemeral.
(c) Because they saw language as a mode of speech for the wealthy.
(d) Because they saw language as potentially empowering the masses.

15. What is the name of the economist Eagleton discusses in his preface?
(a) J. M. Keynes.
(b) I. Fischer.
(c) Adam Smith.
(d) Gordon Tuck.

Short Answer Questions

1. For Eagleton, how did the romantics usher a "forestalling of reasoned critical enquiry"?

2. During the Romantic period, how is literature more than "idle escapism"?

3. What is the name of the pioneering essay the Russian formalist wrote that is the "beginnings of the transformation which has taken over literary theory in this century"?

4. During the last decades of the eighteenth-century, the word prosaic begins to acquire what a kind of connotation?

5. According to Eagleton, what becomes the "panacea for all problems" as part of the romantics' aesthetic theory at the turn of the eighteenth century?

(see the answer keys)

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